Bible Quotes

 

…A dialogue between Bible-lovers, Bible-haters, and
everyone in-between…

 

I am a creature of a day. I am a spirit come from God, and
returning to God. I want to know one thing: the way to heaven. God himself has
condescended to teach me the way. He has written it down in a book. Oh, give me
that book! At any price give me the book of God. Let me be a man of one
book.–John Wesley

 

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He
is always convinced that it says what he means. –George Bernard Shaw

 

It is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion;
the Bible seeks to open one. – William Sloane Coffin

 

The Holy Book of the living God suffers more from its
exponents today than from its opponents. -Leonard Ravenhill

 

It will greatly help you to understand scripture if you note
– no only what is spoken and written, but of whom and to whom, with what words,
at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what
goes before and what follows. –Miles Coverdale, in his introduction to his
Bible translation.

 

When you read God’s Word, you must constantly be saying to
yourself, “It is talking to me, and about me.” –Soren Kierkegaard

 

Never place a period where God has placed a comma. God is
still speaking. Gracie Allen

 

We do not read the Bible the way it is; we read it the way
we are. –Evelyn Uyemura

 

Bible reading is an education in itself. –Lord Tennyson

 

Reading the Bible without meditating on it is like trying to
eat without swallowing. –Anonymous

 

The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined
less than any book that ever existed. –Thomas Paine

 

It is not at all incredible, that a book which has been so
long in the possession of mankind should contain many truths as yet
undiscovered. — Bishop Butler

 

It is clear that there must be difficulties for us in a
revelation such as the Bible. If someone were to hand me a book that was as
simple to me as the multiplication table, and say, ‘This is the Word of God. In
it He has revealed His whole will and wisdom,’ I would shake my head and say,
‘I cannot believe it; that is too easy to be a perfect revelation of infinite
wisdom.’ There must be, in any complete revelation of God’s mind and will and
character and being, things hard for the beginner to understand; and the wisest
and best of us are but beginners. –R.A. Torrey

 

The letter of Scripture is a veil just as much as it is a
revelation; hiding while it reveals, and yet revealing while it hides.—Andrew
Jukes

 

Coming to the Bible through commentaries is much like
looking at a landscape through garret windows, over which generations of
unmolested spiders have spun their webs. –Henry Ward Beecher

 

There is a way of reading the Bible that seems to leave God
far away, off in the shadows somewhere. It is all information and
technicalities and knowledge, but it feels like you’re sitting with your back
towards God. You come up against a difficulty or question, and you go to books,
you ask pastors, friends, strangers on the internet, anyone but Him. Gradually
God gets smaller and dimmer. –Unknown

 

Some people like to read so many [Bible] chapters every day.
I would not dissuade them from the practice, but I would rather lay my soul
asoak in half a dozen verses all day than rinse my hand in several chapters.
Oh, to be bathed in a text of Scripture, and to let it be sucked up in your
very soul, till it saturates your heart! –Charles Haddon Spurgeon

 

In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or
explicitly introduced with “Thus saith the Lord”. It is… not merely
a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does
not invite — it excludes or repels — the merely aesthetic approach. You can
read it as literature only by a tour de force… It demands incessantly to be
taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very
long, except to those who go to it for something quite different. I predict
that it will in the future be read, as it always has been read, almost
exclusively by Christians. –C.S. Lewis

 

We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass
of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in
both the Church and the world.…It is easy to be unaware that it has happened;
it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has
moulded us. –J.I. Packer

 

The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is
the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few
favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible
can make a whole Christian. –AW. Tozer

 

The Bible is a harp with a thousand strings. Play on one to
the exclusion of its relationship to the others, and you will develop discord.
Play on all of them, keeping them in their places in the divine scale, and you
will hear heavenly music all the time. –William P. White

 

For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every
year. If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little
branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what
it was and what it meant. –Martin Luther

 

Here, then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail
in our duty to study God’s Word not so much because it is difficult to
understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work.
Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is
that we are lazy. –R. C. Sproul

 

One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of
God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed.
–Leonard Ravenhill

 

The scripture in times of disputes is like an open town in
times of war, which serves in differently the occasions of both parties.
–Alexander Pope

 

Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find
there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook. — Ludwig von Mises

 

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but
the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
–Mccosh

 

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they
do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
–Mark Twain

 

The Bible is the greatest example of the whole being greater
that its parts. –Michael Phillips.

 

Do you wish to find out the really sublime? Repeat the
Lord’s Prayer. –Napolean

 

The Bible is worth all other books which have ever been
printed. –Patrick Henry

 

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences
progress in ever greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as
much as it desires, beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as
it shines forth in the gospels, it will not go.—Goethe

 

Who decides what is right and wrong in the world? Who has
the authority to define morality for all of creation? It is not the courts,
congress, the media, public opinion, the “politically correct”
police, the “tolerance” brigade or even the church. The only answer
has been, is and always will be Jesus Christ. You can find His opinion on a
great variety of subjects in His best seller… The Bible. –Jeffrey E. Ramey

 

You may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God,
and give it to the devil, if you do not desire to live according to it. —
Martin Luther

 

The word of God hidden in the heart is a stubborn voice to
suppress.–Billy Graham

 

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and
the Bible. –George Washington

 

I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of
this Book that you can by reason and the balance by faith, and you will live
and die a better man. It is the best Book which God has given to man. –Abraham
Lincoln

 

I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred
volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands. –Thomas
Jefferson.

 

So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my
children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will
prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I
have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every
year. –John Quincy Adams

 

If there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the
credit is due to my parents for instilling in me an early love of the
Scriptures. –Daniel Webster

 

Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is
simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part
of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart. –John Ruskin

 

I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great

gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures,
engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where
the scriptures do not reign paramount. –Martin Luther

 

If you believe that exposing your children to violence is a
problem, by all means keep them away from the Bible. –Rev. Charles Henderson

 

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is
aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the
literature of the world. –Henry L. Mencken

 

The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or
ever will be known in the world. –Charles Dickens

 

The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by
alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window
divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern
in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home. –Thomas Carlyle

 

Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and still man’s
obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread,
only his lamp and guide would be gone; the same voyage to make, but his chart
and compass would be overboard! –Henry Ward Beecher

 

The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the
greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to
belittle it is a crime against humanity. –Immanuel Kant

 

The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and
oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it. –Thomas
Huxley

 

It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a
Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human
freedom. — Horace Greeley

 

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and
we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we
opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. –Bishop Desmond Tutu

 

We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special
constable’s handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while
they are overloaded. –Charles Kingsley

 

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling
blocks in the way of women’s emancipation. –Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 

The Bible itself is intolerant, and true followers of God’s
word should be as well.– Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University

 

Too often we see the Bible through whatever lens we get from
our culture. –Brian McLaren

 

He who perverts Scripture is not the man who reduces this
sacred poetry to its true meaning. Nay, that man perverts the Bible who hardens
into dogmas the glowing metaphors of Eastern poetry. –Thomas Allin

 

Any number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate
an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a
word about whales or apples. In the former case it refers to a fish, which
might imply any sort of sea-monster; and in the second, to the essential
experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of the tree, which is obviously
more general and even more mystical . . . The things that look silly now are
the first rationalistic explanations rather than the first religious or
primitive outlines. If those original images had been left in their own natural
mystery of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep, nobody would have
quarrelled with them half so much . . . But it is unfair to turn round and
blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic
allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the
Bible.–G. K. Chesterton

 

Just because the Bible says something doesn’t make it truth
if what you are saying from the Bible is slanted, distorted, mis-applied, or
merely the letter of the word. –J. Preston Eby

 

One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it
does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious. –James I. Packer

 

The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has
stood so much bad preaching. –A.T. Robertson

 

The devil can quote Scriptures and so can his ministers and
they can quote them in perfect King James English. –Gary Amirault

 

We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if
for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty
exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also
confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying
realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we
may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame,
or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and
adorations. … –C. S. Lewis

 

Spouting scripture has no magic to dispel the devil.
Scripture has phenomenal power but unless you submit your mind to its inerrant
truth, its power is largely lost to you. –Martha Kilpatrick

 

The one thing the New Testament forbids us to do is to treat
it as a static document to be used as a set of proof-texts for instant
solutions to complex and controversial contemporary problems. To misuse the New
Testament in this way is to deny its dynamic character and to fail to realize that
the Word has to be applied in a specific context. …A static interpretation of
the New Testament is dependent on a frozen Christology.–Karl Paul Donfried

 

The Christian community continues to exist because the
conclusions of the critical study of the Bible are largely withheld from them.
–Hans Conzelmann

 

The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of
the gentleman who reads it. –Robert Ingersoll

 

Both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where
I read white.–William Blake

 

When you are reading a book in a dark room, and come to a
difficult part, you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bibles
to Christ. –Robert Murray M’Cheyne

 

The Bible rose to the place it now occupies because it
deserved to rise to that place, and not because God sent anybody with a box of
tricks to prove its divine authority. –Bruce Barton

 

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than
in any profane history.– Sir Isaac Newton

 

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth
and nothing but the truth. –Samuel Butler

 

More than 400 errors in the first edition of the King James
Bible were corrected in a subsequent edition two years later. –Neil Lightfoot,
How We Got the Bible pg. 59

 

That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument,
because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
–Thomas Paine

 

We are all literalists, we are all doubters. It just depends
on which part of the Bible we happen to be focusing our attention. –Michael
Phillips

 

The Bible is no mere book, but a Living Creature, with a
power that conquers all that oppose it. –Napoleon

 

The observant man recognizes many mysteries into which he
can not pretend to see, and he remembers that the world is too wide for the eye
of one man. But the modern sophists are sure of everything, especially if it
contradicts the Bible. –Charles Haddon Spurgeon

 

The Bible is a collection of fantastic legends without
scientific support.– The Communist Dictionary issued by the Soviet State Publishing

 

I am going to put the Bible out of business. –Robert
Ingersoll

 

Another century and there will not be a Bible on earth!
–Voltaire

 

Voltaire expected that within fifty years of his lifetime
there would not be one Bible in the world. His house is now a distribution
center for Bibles in many languages. –Corrie Ten Boom

 

Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books,
we would admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all
its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in
rude, barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that
it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its
parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the
star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in
Nature’s night. These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact,
so palpably absurd, that every free, unbiased soul is forced to raise the
standard of revolt. –Robert Ingersoll

 

The Catholics have a Pope. Protestants laugh at them, and
yet the Pope is capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the
Pope is mortal, and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever.
The Protestants have a book for their Pope. The book cannot advance. Year after
year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever. –Robert
Ingersoll

 

The foibles, inconsistencies and humanness (of the Bible)
all the more show us that the letter of the Scripture is not to be enthroned as
an idol to be worshipped of itself. The letter will always kill. It is the
spirit which God has breathed into his holy instrument, the spirit of his high
Logos, this Word, that transmits its life to all those who obey it. –Michael
Phillips

 

The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what
seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to
use it in another way—to find the Word in it…to re-live, while we read, the
whole Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel
the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it
works. –C.S. Lewis

 

Instead of believing therefore that because the Scripture is
human and has grown with men, and has marks of our weakness and death and shame
upon it, therefore it must perish and see corruption, I believe that it can
never perish or see corruption. I see it is human; I see that it has grown; I
see it can be judged and wounded. I believe too that it has in its composition
exactly so much of perishableness as Christ’s flesh had when He walked here
with His apostles. But it is like Christ’s body, the peculiar tabernacle of
God’s truth. And those who walk by it day and night know this, for they have
seen, as all shall one day see, it transfigured. –Andrew Jukes

 

The Bible reveals God’s adaptability, as it were, to take
the human drama and bring to life from it a flawed document, with its mistakes
and lost endings and errant genealogies, and then raise that document and
elevate it to His use by imbuing it with spiritual power that transcends the
level of humanity altogether. –Michael Phillips

 

There is an old Italian proverb about the nature of
translation: “Traddutore, traditore!” This means simply,
“Translators—traitors!” Of course, as you can see, something is lost in the
translation of this pithy expression: there is great similarity in both the
spelling and the pronunciation of the original saying, but these get diluted
once they are put in English dress. Even the translation of this proverb
illustrates its truth! — Dr. Daniel Wallace, “The History of the English
Bible”

 

We do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very
meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our
profession,…containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God: as the
King’s speech which he uttered in Parliament, being translated into French,
Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King’s speech, though it not be
interpreted by every translator with the like grace nor peradventure so fitly
for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere.–From the translators to
the readers in the introduction to the original 1611 King James Bible.

 

He who reads the Bible in translation is like a man who
kisses his bride through a veil. –Hayyim Nachman Bialik.

 

Still, when a veil there must be, the translator’s task is
to make it as gossamer-fine a veil as may be. Indeed, the face of even the most
beautiful of women may be enhanced by a veil, if only the veil be worthy of her
beauty. –MacGregor, Literary History of the Bible

 

Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is
translated. –C.S. Lewis

 

There are no Bibles which do not contain errors. But don’t
let that scare you. You see, if our Father would have provided a perfectly
written English translation for you, you probably would spend even less time in
prayer and communion and study than you do now.—Gary Amirault

 

To preach the Bible as ‘the handbook for life,’ or as the
answer to every question, rather than as the revelation of Christ, is to turn
the Bible into an entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached
Scripture, as we can see clearly from the questions they asked Jesus. For the
Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia for life’s dilemmas.
–Michael Horton

 

We must stop using the Bible as though it were a potpourri
of inerrant proof-texts by which we can bring people into bondage to our
religious traditions…We must no longer use the Bible as the Pharisees used
the Torah when they gave it absolute and final status. Christian biblicism is
no different from Jewish legalism. It is the old way of the letter, not the new
way of the Spirit. –Robert D. Brinsmead

 

One of the dangers from which the Church should pray to be
delivered is idolatry of the letter of Scripture. The letter exists for the
spirit, not the spirit for the letter. Literalism is the grave in which
spiritual religion is buried. The New Testament is a book which is to be
spiritually interpreted. –James M. Campbell

 

If we move in the direction of biblial absolutism (“the
religion of the Book”), how can we escape turning the New Testament into a
Christian Torah and the gospel into a new law? Once we do that, religious
fascism with all its sectarian ugliness cannot be far away. Far better a
mistaken Christian (a heretic) who has somehow caught the Spirit of Christ,
than an orthodox Protestant who thinks that the Spirit is mediated to him
through the letter of correct theology. –Robert D. Brinsmead

 

We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible
into a “paper pope.” The Bible is only the result of the Word of God.
We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the
perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes
possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any
sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open
and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself. –Jacques Ellul

 

The Bible in itself is not the Word of God. The Word of God
is a person (John 1:1). Neither does the Bible have life, power or light in
itself any more than did the Jewish Torach. These attributes may be ascribed to
the Bible only by virtue of its relationship to Him who is Word, Life, Power
and Light. Life is not in the book, as the Pharisees supposed, but only in the
Man of the book (John 5:39). –Robert Brinsmead

 

The Bible is a wonderful book. It is the truth about the
Truth. It is not the Truth. A sermon taken from the Bible can be a wonderful
thing to hear. It is the truth about the truth about the truth. But it is not
the truth. There have been many books written about the things contained in the
Bible. I have written some myself. They can be quite wonderful to read. They
are the truth about the truth about truth about the Truth. But they are NOT the
Truth. Only Jesus Christ is the Truth. Sometimes the Truth can be drowned in a
multitude of words. –Richard Wurmbrand

 

The New Testament authors did not customarily refer to their
written record as the Word of God. That subsequent Christian tradition tends to
do this while the writers themselves hesitate to do it should tell us
something. Evidently they distinguished the difference between the living,
infinite Word and the written record more clearly than we do. If the written
record is every called the Word, it is the Word only in a secondary, derivative
or relational sense. It is not the Word in the absolute sense. Strictly
speaking, the Scripture is the witness to the Word of God, and like a good
witness, it does not speak of itself but points away from itself. –Robert D.
Brinsmead

 

The human qualities of the raw materials show through.
Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are
not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every
passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of
God. –C.S Lewis

 

Perhaps a way of illustrating the purpose of the law would
be to liken the law to the chaff of grain or the shell of a nut. Christ is the
True Meat which was to come at an appointed time in history. The Mosaic law
protected, preserved, the central message of a redeemer of mankind who would
come in the fullness of time. Chaff or shells act as preservers until the seed
inside is ready to be eaten or until planting time. When it is time to eat the
seed in the nut, we break off the shell! It has served its purpose. –Gary
Amirault

 

The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is
written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and
leather. The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is
free. ‘The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.’
The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only
because it corresponds to God’s Word in the universe. It is the present Voice
which makes the written word powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber
within the covers of a book. –A. W. Tozer

 

If you don’t live by a Voice you will fashion a god in your
own image. You will take His Word and dissect it, to make it speak what you
want it to say.– John Enslow

 

Shift from your mind conquering the Bible, down into
surrender to the Spirit of God who will whisper to you what He meant by what He
wrote. –Martha Kilpatrick

 

The whole meaning of spiritual understanding is that we see
what the Spirit has always meant. It is one of our laws of interpretation that
the whole Bible is focused in Christ, and that the work of the Holy Spirit in
every dispensation relates to Christ. –T. Austin-Sparks

 

Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts
written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words
which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which
Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made. –Phillips Brooks

 

The Word of God is a Person. When you read it, do you see
words or do you see Him? –Jacquelyn K. Heasley

 

To understand the Book in real perception, it’s necessary to
know the Author before you read His Book. To truly KNOW Jesus as He is, we MUST
know Him in experience. –Martha Kilpatrick

 

Knowing the Word of God does not necessarily mean that we
know the God of the Word. –Chip Brogden

 

What we really need, after all, is not to defend the Bible

but to understand it. –Millar Burrows

 

The longer you read the Bible, the more you will like it; it
will grow sweeter and sweeter; and the more you get into the spirit of it, the
more you will get into the spirit of Christ. –Romaine

 

The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to
an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that
they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the
very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.– A. W. Tozer

 

One way the God-Man reveals Himself to us, of all ways, is
not in a glorious vision or supernatural event, but in the pages of this thing
we call the Bible. Imagine that. How odd. A book. Why not just appear to the
one who seeks Him and speak face to face. No! Why? It would kill us. It would
absolutely blow us away to be confronted with the Real Jesus, because the Jesus
we have come to believe in is a fairy tale, a jolly elf, a fantasy character.
The Bible prepares us for Him, does it not? Using types, shadows, stories, just
to whet your appetite and get you accustomed to Him and His dealings so you are
not totally shocked when you do meet Him. –Chip Brogden

 

The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world just
because it tells me the story of Jesus.– George MacDonald

 

The Bible “A Book Worth More than all the other Books
that were ever printed” (Patrick Henry)